Why can’t I use a stapler?

I’ve not suddenly begun doing Agony Aunt style posts. This is a serious problem that I, and only I, seem to be afflicted with.

I cannot use a stapler properly.

One of the very first things I established when I began my current job was that I was completely unable to perform the action of binding several sheets of paper together. It wouldn’t be so bad if I’d simply broken it immediately and been done with it; instead the poor person tasked with training me up had to watch aghast as I made at least 4 attempts every time I was required to staple paper into files.

Even now my staples are bent, skewed, not entirely punctured through the paper. This happens when stapling 2 of the thinnest sheets known to man together. There’s also the fact that every time I load new staples and attempt to close the long plastic cover, the metal spring inside attempts to ping the new staples into outer orbit, sending them flying rather dangerously across the office in all directions. One would think I was siphoning in TNT.

People appear to be used to it now. If someone new to the office were to be alarmed by the the constant “clacking” and subsequent cursing coming from my desk, they would be told “don’t worry, it’s just Tom; he’s stapling”.

Why can’t I perform this simple function?

Shall I give another example? Who here is able to navigate a room without walking into something? Everyone, is it? Not I. Oh no…I have other ideas. Apparently. In fact today I noticed I can’t even stand still properly.

I don’t know what happens when I’m walking around the office. My legs appear to want to turn corners before I’ve approached them and this sends me striding into various waste bins and filing cabinets. I’ll be striding down the office and my legs will think “oh what’s that?” and attempt to turn me, which results in an embarrassing and rather pointless weave, to anyone who notices at any rate.

Put me in an unfurnished room and I’ll find something to trip over.

And I was standing on the spot talking to someone earlier today, when suddenly my legs decided that, actually, you know what would be a great idea? Buckling! Yes, I am perfectly confident my health and strength is up to scratch. My legs just wanted to buckle at the back, which made me lurch backwards a bit and steady myself on a wall, much to the utter terror of the person I was talking to. That look flashed on their face. You know.

“What are they on?”

The truly scary thing about all of this is that I have managed to obtain a driving licence, and a house, without actually breaking any laws. This person who cannot staple sheets of paper together, walk appropriately, or even stand in a normal fashion, is about to transport themself about and is responsible for maintaining a roof over his head.

Panic. I would.

My ancestors would be severely disappointed in me…

No, they really would.

My ancestors were out there. In woods, caves. In nature. Getting dinner was an affair that involved hours spent hunting big, angry things with rather nasty teeth that were simultaneously hunting them. I know Tesco is pretty awful on a Saturday but what they went through just to remain alive was pretty impressive.

All for what? By preserving themselves and their DNA and their ability to reproduce, the end result has become me. Me, who spent 4 consecutive minutes last Thursday attempting to open a single Tesco bag at the checkout, during which time my wife opened 5 and filled them with shopping. It appears that during the millennia of evolution between my ancestors and me, basic motor functions have been phased out.

But that’s not all.

My ancestors were throwing big heavy sharpy things, with accuracy, at snarling beasts with massive teeth, in lands far removed from the cushty neighbourhood that I now reside in. I imagine these environments were somewhat haphazard with poisonous insects, snakes, spiders and whatnot.

And now there’s me. I enjoy being outdoors, don’t get me wrong. I fully endorse “getting some fresh air” and entirely believe the goodness it can do someone. But I also regard undertaking hard physical labour outdoors, especially labour that involves disturbing the possible resting places of insects and other nasties, with some uneasiness.

You see,  my senses and instincts seem to be stuck in “ancestor” mode. What this basically means is that whilst I’m not faced with the same dangers as my ancestral folk were, my reactions are still in-line with what was required of them upon encountering a sabre-toothed tiger.

Take, for example, the occasion a week ago when I was providing pretty limp-wristed assistance in the construction of some garden decking. Before the work started I was required to do some weed clearing and also remove some big pieces of wood that were in the way. I shuffled about for a while, donning some gloves and began pulling up some of the weeds. It was all going swimmingly until I began moving the big pieces of wood. These pieces had been there for a long, long time, and my sudden movement disturbed a number of spiders that had found comfort amongst them.

Now I happened to be carrying one of these pieces across the garden when one of these spiders waddled down towards my hand wondering what was going on. I noticed this in mid-step, and whilst my brain knew, knew, that this spider (of fair size) was completely harmless and that my gloves would stop any creepy tickling, my gut reaction was to spring wildly into the air whilst dropping the piece of wood straight onto the floor.

I’m not lying when I say all thought left my mind at the stage I jumped. It wouldn’t have mattered if a priceless vase was underneath me at that time, that wood was hitting the floor. My magnificent leap would have certainly sprung me well out of reach of a rabid hyena or something, but it was quite unnecessary avoiding action to take from a small spider, which I spotted scuttling off aimlessly towards the shed a minute later.

I thought my dramas were over, but suddenly I heard a buzz right around my ear, and instantly my legs went again – Shhhhhbroooooiiiiiiiing – and so did my hands as they flapped akin to a humming-bird around my ears, as my instincts shouted DANGER! at me, but my brain watched on somberly, tutting, whilst saying it’s a fly, moron.

And it was a fly, of course. A fly which I must have accidentally batted into the 6th dimension with my frantic hand movements, because I never did see it.

It took a day in the great outdoors to realise that I am absolutely not suited to it.  I appreciate it, I like the scenery, and I value the good contributions it makes towards my health.

But I know, for certain in fact, that my ancestors must be watching over my helpless, sometimes flailing body, and thinking “we worked our arses off, killed tigers with our bare hands, escaped from the grips of boa-constrictors and lived in a sodding cave so this gangly idiot can mince about at the sight of anything that resembles nature? What an utter waste.”

And I simply do not blame them.

The way we do things…The Solitary Shopping Man

Everyone does their own thing.

This is good, really, as it would be quite dull if every single person acted uniformly.

Sometimes, a person’s “own thing” will be truly unique and wondrous. For example, my lovely wife has a brilliantly imaginative way of washing up, whereby the washed cups, plates and pans get stacked in some sort of crockery version of Jenga on the draining board. It’s disconcerting, because sometimes the entire stack could be supported by something as innocent as a wooden spoon, and even more trepidating when you must remove a random item from somewhere around the middle, as you really have no idea how important it is, structurally speaking. A number of times I have walked away having successfully extracted a glass for my orange juice, only to hear from the next room three unknown items all abrubtly re-adjust themselves in a manner that leads you to believe that should the whole lot come crashing down, the noise would be almost as bad as the cleanup operation.

Amazingly this hasn’t happened, and the only breakages that have happened have been when I’ve stacked things in a conventional manner. So really, I appear to know squat about the subject, and should stop right now.

Anyway, I digress.

Stereotyping is a nice easy way out to finding a blame for things happening in society. But sometimes, isn’t it just too bloody easy?

Men food-shopping by themselves.

Now, occasionally I am one of these, and my observations come as someone who may be guilty of a few of the things I’ve seen. However, not being conciously aware of these occurences, should they have happened, my concerns would probably lie elsewhere.

I’ve broken down solo male food-shoppers into the few categories thus:

The “I’m-Not-Fucking-About” Strider
From the offset it’s easy to tell that it’s this man’s turn to do the shopping, and there are a vast, unimaginable number of other more important things he’d rather be doing. This shop can be translated into one super-massive reluctant sigh of resignation, as the man briskly patrols the aisles, not even making visual contact with the items on the list in front of him. This shop lasts as short as humanely possible, and the partner at home has to put up with at least 17 things missing which are aggressively dismissed as “not at all important” by the indignant man upon confrontation, and no matter what is said, the man’s suffering partner will not be able to convince him that actually, toilet paper is a fairly large part of the average person’s hygienic routine.

The “I-DON’T-Need-A-List” Man
This guy is shopping because he has made a smart-arse comment to his other half about how their compulsive list-making habits are ridiculous and pathetic. Upon being invited to do the shopping from memory or else shut the fuck up, the man has done the right thing and put his money where his mouth is. Unfortunately, this leads to the man returning home with mostly items that were completely unnecessary, along with a number of items that have never been on a shopping list before. Any items that are bought correctly will be of a brand that is generally regarded as “just a step above eating dogshit” by the man’s other half. The man will not admit he is wrong, but will only make critical comments in his head from that point on. A semi-victory, as it were.

The “Stare-At-Every-Item” Bloke
Some men need to memorise every colour and contour of an item, or just find themselves startled by new, unopened products, as they spend most of their time in the supermarket engaged in heavy eye-contact with random things on the shelves. A number of these men won’t even put said product in the trolley, instead returning it to the shelf and seemingly picking a “safe” option. Not to be confused with “I-Must-Read-Every-Single-Label-Ever” man.

The “Bachelor” Man
Trolley will contain approximately 14 large bottles of Lucozade, 4 Sizzler “Do-It-Yourself” burgers, a pint of milk, a copy of Nuts and Top Gear, and an obscure house necessity like bleach.

The “Fish-Out-Of-Water” Guy
Will give the impression of someone who has plucked from 1843 and dropped into the supermarket. Can be found standing in the middle of the general household aisle, looking about them as if being hunted, wide-eyed and completely unsure of what he’s supposed to do. Has never been shopping before to buy “responsible things” and only knows his way around the technology department. Not to be confused with “Hey-They’ve-Moved-Everything-About-Since-I-Was-Last-Here-Why-Do-They-Do-That-It’s-Really-Fucking-Annoying-Especially-As-There’s-No-Obvious-Reason” Man.

The “Counting-The-Pennies” Man
The cost of each item is added to a giant calculation taking place on a sheet of paper taped to the child’s seat in the trolley. If an item causes an unattractive number to appear, it is discarded regardless of importance. His shop will always be £42.55, as that’s exactly 7% of his monthly income at a tax rate of 10.6% on the first £500 and 21% on every £5 over that. This man is an endangered species, being vulnerable to stress, not a weakness to have with a an ever-unstable economy.

The “I-Can’t-Pack-For-Shit” Guy
This man has good intentions when he begins packing the shopping as it passes through the checkouts, but by the third bag it’s all gone hopelessly wrong as the influx of products exceeds the man’s ability to organise various items into different categories. There will be at least one bag that simply contains frozen items and another that contains drinks (easily identifiable to a simple man brain, for example: ifVeryCold = putIntoBag1 otherwise putIntoBagX), but by the end of the shop, a packet of lightbulbs will be resting on some tins of dog-food, which will be nestled next to Marigold Gloves and between a random pear and some cashew nuts.

——————————

There are many more types of lonesome shopping man out there. It may even vary from store to store. But I reckon you won’t get many diverting from the mainstream.

Except me.

The Constipated Conspiracy [Old Skool Blog]

This blog was written on 6th September 2008! A trip down memory lane.

—————————————————————————————-

Every Friday night, a customer who is struck with life-long constipation visits Tescos, picks up a packet of laxatives, and between the health and beauty aisle and the bakery, pockets the tabs of pills inside.

The empty packet is left somewhere in either aisle 35 or 36.

A coworker revealed this to me, on Thursday, after finding two packets in different locations in what can only be described as a “bad day” for the customer in question.

There are many theories behind this. It may be a customer who really does suffer severe constipation all of the time, and maybe every Friday night sees a spike in the sales of prunes. Maybe the customer in question is a clyptomaniac and revels in the thieving of these tablets every single week.

At £1.75 a packet, it is a fairly cheap way of becoming regular.

And, according to the packet, they provide “gentle, predictable relief” to constipation.

Personally, I don’t want to be within sight of the person who has bought the “abrubt, out-of-freakin’-nowhere” relief tablets.

Perhaps those tablets should be forwarded to the track athletes training for 2012?

It’s a bit like the whole Nurofen Plus saga. Apparently they get rid of your headache twice as fast.

Which is excellent. But it also begs the question as to why normal Nurofen still exists. Not many people will be of the mindset “I have a stonking headache but I’m not too bothered if it goes or not”.

Anyway, this constipated customer is now quickly gaining legendary status amongst a few of the bakery / bread and cakes employees. We are now all going to be on the lookout for them.

We may be able to spot them from how they walk. Alternatively, we could remove all of the packets from the shelf and wait to see who enquires.

To be continued….

————————————————————————————

What a life I had!

Let there be light……eventually.

Light has obviously always been there. Even earliest man appreciated the fact that when that big fiery disc was in the sky, they could see where they were going better than when the white partially obscured disc was up there.

Man then invented fire, which potentially brought light into places where the big fiery disc couldn’t reach.

Then some bright spark (no pun etc) had a go at harnessing a recently invented phenomenon called electricity, and suddenly lightbulbs were “in”.

And now, in the year 2011, Tesco has realised this and thought “hey, this could be a bit of a money spinner”.

As the man of the house, it’s my duty to watch things break gradually over periods of time whilst contemplating doing something about it. Recently, this responsibility had me observing the three lightbulbs in the kitchen spotlights fizzle out one by one. Taking my duty ever-seriously, I waited until all three were gone, and I’d walked downstairs at 7.15am to a pitch-black kitchen and attempted to retrieve breakfast, before taking positive action.

“To Tesco!” I thought.  Later that day, I found myself asking a shelf-monkey where the bulbs were. “In the gardening department,” was the reply. After explaining a daffodil would look nice but be useless at preventing me from stubbing my foot on any available blunt object, I was then told “they’re all opposite the TVs”.

As I walked towards said department, I pondered on “they’re all“. Bit of an exaggeration, I thought. Until I reached “opposite the TVs” and discovered every single lightbulb man could ever wish to own. There were two 4 metre long shelving units dedicated to bulbs.

I wanted a plain screw-in spotlight bulb, 40W. I thought for some reason they would simply be there, in front of me, quite conveniently. What I did find was a plethora of methods for lighting your home.

There were spotlight bulbs, spherical bulbs, elliptical bulbs, bulbs that seemed to be impersonating towel-rails, bulbs that boasted “energy-saving abilities”, bulbs that were powerful enough to see through time, bulbs that changed colour at random, bulbs that reflected your mood, bulbs that did every-bloody-thing except screw-in and LIGHT MY KITCHEN.

I then spotted “Tesco Value Lightbulbs”. Exactly what Tesco value light can do cheaply, I’m not sure. Travel slower? We live in an age where, apparently, light can be provided mega-expensively or ridiculously cheaply and still be completely the same in all scenarios. At least with Tesco value food you get the bonus of having a third of the ocean’s salt content added for “extra taste” at “less cost”, as long as the cost isn’t represented by your life expectancy.

There were two other people gazing hopelessly at the shelves, index finger vaguely pointing like a futile Divining rod, whereas I went for the cocky “hands-on-hips-whilst-staring-blankly” approach.

It paid off in the end, because I got four 40W spotlight bulbs for just £3! Or should that be…I had to spend £3 just to get four poxy lightbulbs!

Bah. Who cares anyway?

How to be the perfect “Voxpop”

Voxpops are simple. When a major event unfolds throughout a day, or perhaps the Government announces it’s going to sell off the nation’s tectonic plates to a Russian oligarch, the live camera crews take to the streets to find out what “people” think. “People” have been known to do things like listen to NDubz and vote for the Conservatives, so perhaps their opinions are of not much consequence, but it doesn’t help when the questions asked by the reporter are so monumentally stupid that they bend time.

Everyone has seen this before. “Man” and “Man’s Family” have just escaped from a rampaging fire that’s burning down their street. News reporter corners them and asks: “when you were running screaming from your house as flames roared around you, how did you feel?”And the victim always seems unable to formulate a satisfyingly rude response.

So, if (heaven forbird) your house burns down in a catastrophic fire, and YOU are one day chosen to be a “vox-popper” and YOU find yourself being asked that utterly insulting question (or similar) by a reporter, feel free to adopt one of these personalities on the house…

The Insurance Job
“Well to be honest I don’t think it could have come at a better time. We’ll be able to pay off her gambling debts, pack the teenager off to university somewhere remote and I’ll get my Aston Martin. Life ROCKS!”

The Hidden Past
“You call that a fire? I’ve caused more havoc with an insence candle in my time, although I’m now banned from the Jesus Army centre…”

Totally Literal
“How do I feel? I can touch things using my hands, and the nerve endings in my fingers sense the temperature and various other properties and I can use that to gain an idea of my surroundings and other useful information. For example, I KNOW from experience that you shouldn’t wave a baseball bat in someone’s face like you’re doing now…if it hits someone it could be very painful…”

Completely Psycho
“Did you see the flames? SO PRETTY! Dancing and twirling like ballerinas in a hellish rendition of Swan Lake…muahahahahaha…ahahahahahaa. HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAHAHAHAHAHA!” *facial spasms*

Accidental Confession
“I honestly didn’t know that cat’s fur could retain so much lighter fluid, or that their claws were so efficient at emitting sparks on a metal railing. Oh well! Live and learn…although Whiskers probably doesn’t agree with that first bit…”

The Mechanic
“It’ll buff out.”

It Was Fate, Honest
“I should have known something like this would happen when my horoscope said ‘A warm receiption awaits your parents-in-law today’.”

Aren’t I In A Film?
“HURRY! You have to hurry! My baby’s in there! My wonderful little baby. My precious child….my…..MY PRECIOUS……“

——————————————–

This will help provide entertainment during a time when, and I’m sure you’ll agree, some light-hearted banter is necessary to help provide comfort to those affected.

And if we see a Sky news reporter copiously cack themselves live on national television in the process, then society wins as a whole.

I’ve Sussed Commuting

I had the recent pleasure of going to London for a day. Unusually, this actually fell into the category of “business” and therefore required me to travel during “Peak Hours”.

The train I got on was the 7.39 to London, taking exactly 1 hour. Being a total noob, I stood at a random spot on the platform and mentally accused all of the commuters of being random for gathering at seemingly arbitrary spots down the platform. Of course, when the empty train arrived, I realised that these spots were where the doors on the train would be when it stopped.

So not being the first on the train meant I had to play that game where you look at the seating arrangements where you have six seats, three abreast and facing each other, with the middle spaces only being free, and wonder exactly how much you will piss everyone off if you attempt to sit there.

However, London Midland laid on a larger train, so I wondered down the platform until I happily found a nearly-empty carriage. I found myself beginning the journey in relative comfort, with leg room and everything.

I realised I was on a side of the train I never normally travel on. This helped me spot things that I don’t normally see on trips to London. For example, I was on a relatively fast train  and during the latter half of the journey it thunders through many smaller stations. One of these stations I’d never seen before, and I doubt I’ll ever see again, as it seemed to be stuck in an era where everything was made of wood, and I’m fairly sure our brief 60mph visit completely levelled the place. There was also the station that didn’t appear to have any way onto it at all. No gates, carpark, nothing. The only sign of a town I saw was up high, where a bridge spanned the railway. It would appear the only way to leave that town is to hurl yourself 25 feet onto a concrete platform or possibly the 9:21 to Crewe.

The train got very crowded after Milton Keynes and Leighton Buzzard, and I was thankful for being tucked in a corner next to a window. I was in seat 3 of a 3 seat combination. Someone sat in-between me and the guy in seat 1. This didn’t half piss me off.

Commuting TO London is relatively easy. Of course, the fun really begins when you commute THROUGH London.

Travelling on the Underground during peak hours requires you to voluntarily strip yourself of anything that you would remotely call a “human right”. You even have to ignore the basic need to quench your own thirst, lest your abrupt hand movements clumsily knock someone on the arm, which in turn creates a spectacular assault-based domino effect that escalates in severity until the final person in the chain ends up losing an arm to a manic businessman with an iSword app on his phone.

The first train from Euston was full. Actually, no it wasn’t full. It was crammed with the kind of precision and efficiency that made me wonder if I was witnessing a Guinness World Record attempt. There was absolutely no space left on it, and moments before the doors closed, someone tried to get on. They created space out of NO SPACE. Surely this guy needed to talk to Stephen Hawking. The doors closed and this guy was moulded into the curve that makes the side of a tube train. His neck looked particularly painful. By painful, I mean broken in about 4 places. But instead of hospital treatment, he sought out his phone and seemed to be unaware that he should be in any kind of discomfort.

The next train was marginally better, and I braved it. I somehow shuffled between all the spaces, like a coin being shoved into the rows of other coins on one of those pointless 10p machines at Megabowl, and found myself wrapped a bit awkwardly around the centre pole, like a partially melted curly-wurly around a chair leg.

A man bustled on with moments to spare and ended up close to me. He then proceeded to get out a newspaper (The Daily Mail). This was a defiant two-fingers up to the situation if ever I saw one. This guy was clearly thinking “this is MY 4 square centimetres of space and I’m going to bloody use it”. He may have imagined that he looked normal, but actually he was only able to read about 6 words at a time due to the paper practically being imprinted onto his retiners. Combined with the fact his other hand was dangling uselessly despite his arm being raised, and the comical lean due to one leg being thrown out for balance, he looked more like a right-wing Thunderbird puppet.

I had to get off at Embankment and change to the District Line. Commuters do not obey any laws when striding between trains. Nobody allows you to double back, and attempting to do so will result in a slow-motion multi-person pileup, at the end of which someone explodes violently. If you need to be over THERE and it means crossing a steadily moving flow of commuters, you just go for it, and sod them. This attitude worked in my favour, and it actually is the attitude you need to ever contemplate commuting in general. Bloody sod them.

Because that’s their attitude towards you, after all.

And I’ve grown not to care, because down in the London Underground the word “sorry” means little more than “pity me, for I dwell where THAR BE DRAGONS”. Nobody could give a shit, and if they did, they’d charge you £58.30 for it anyway.

How to be charitable if you’re a celebrity…

There are many ways of being charitable, whether you are kindly donating the odd £1 or so to the box-shakers outside Tesco or giving a monthly sum to one of the various good causes you see adverts for on television.

Don’t get me wrong on this. Donating to charity should always be a voluntary action; a decision made by the individual that they would like to help people less fortunate than themselves. Enforcing charity completely undermines the point of it.

Saying that, I get quite bemused when I watch programmes during what I call the “Children in Need” season. These needy children are relatively quiet for a large percentage of the year, but always seem to run into difficulties in about November. Maybe some time needs to be invested in teaching them how to manage their resources better? I don’t know. Anyway, the programmes on TV all seem to recognise this yearly demand and everyone instantly becomes a huge philanthropist. All programmes plonk “celebrity” in front of their normal title and invite swarms of them to come and take part, from top end celebrities down to some bloke who knows a man who knows someone that is the third cousin of Bono.

These programmes often offer prize money or something to the contestant who wins, but for the celebrities, they have to pick a charity to donate their winnings to. Quite a querky idea on the face of it, until you think about it a bit more.

Recently I saw the Celebrity Apprentice from a few years ago, which was for Children in Need, and various big-wigs were summonsed to face Mighty Alan and organise an event to invite a load more celebrities to in order to make the most money possible.

Now, between them they raised over £1m (the girls team doing 75% of this), which is mightily impressive, but when you considered some of the celebrities at work, (Piers Morgan, Alastair Campbell, some Hollywood actor who was scared of cameras), you can’t help but feel that between them they could have raised that amount from having a search down the back of the sofa.

Perhaps I’m being too critical here. The entire programme was worth it to see Piers Morgan get chewed up and spat out by Lord Sugar. It’s shame that he literally didn’t get chewed up by a giant mechanical meatgrinding thing and then spat out over the whole of London. But I digress slightly.

This point was hammered home better when I saw a Celebrity Come Dine With Me which involved the dragons from Dragon’s Den. These arrogant sacks of skin regularly sit in front of people who have spent time and effort creating something that may or may not be slightly wierd, unnecessary or off-the-wall, with £100k or so sitting on a table beside them. And THEN they have the nerve to tell most of these people that they are wasting their time by being creative as what they’ve created is the equivilant to a proud cat dragging in a mouse it’s torn in half and presenting it to the dubious owner, and that they should go away and do something else as business is not for them.

So it was slightly rich, excuse the pun, to see them playing for a meagre £1,000 donation towards their chosen charity.

I don’t know how much charity work any of these celebrities do, and I’m sure that they all do plenty, and even if they didn’t, I would be honestly hypocritical to criticise.

The point I’m making is that the impression that I am receiving from these various shows is that these celebrities can only donate to charity if they take part in some TV show that usually uses “normal people”, who probably take the money and spend it on themselves, the ungrateful gits.

I mean, it’s not like celebrities regularly fly to flood-devastated countries and have a gander from a helicopter before landing and wandering through the remains of villages and then offer a woman 100,000 rupees (£800ish) for her baby daughter whilst promising to give it “the best life it could have”. Oh, wait.

Bedposts and Neck Cricks – Why we’re far from invincible…

So on Friday I came down with this fluey type thing that’s doing the circuit at the moment. Jem has also been suffering, and now it’s my turn. And on a weekend.

I sit here with my chest feeling as if someone is tap dancing in stilettos, awaiting the next bout of wretched dry coughing that does absolutely nothing except make my throat redder and rawer.

Needless to say, manflu has struck big time.

I have moaned about it of course (I am a man, it’s my right), but recently I’ve been thinking about how us powerful, top-of-the-foodchain human beings are really not so untouchable at all. I mean, I’ve been reduced to feeling like this by something that can’t even be seen without many £thousands worth of technology. And given the option, I care enough to simply take the £thousands and spend it on a new bathroom or something, rather than get a faceful of the nasty little things that, according to the news, look like a volleyball with iron-railings sticking half out of them.

This is perhaps my downfall. You are supposed to “know your enemy” in order to effectively defeat it, and all I’ve done is provide it with a warm cozy body to accommodate it.

But even if I was on first name basis with this fluey bug then there would be other things that I may fall victim to.

Evolution has gifted us humans with many, many unique abilities that have enabled us to prosper on the world we have. Communication is perhaps one of the key ones.

But along the way, evolution threw in a few little curve balls just to remind us that if we get too cocky, we’re one Darwinesque-change away from wiping ourselves out in rather unspectacular fashion.

Example. Evolution gifted us the ability to talk to each other, which obviously helped early humans work together to find food, provide shelter and advance technology. But to stop us thinking we had it easy, evolution also gave us the uncanny nack to choke ourselves on our own saliva.

My temperature-addled brain cannot think of one beneficial reason for this. You will have experienced this before. It can be a completely normal day in every sense of the word, until for some reason your brain sends a little batch of saliva down the passage you should be using for breathing. This causes an instant choking splutter followed by a coughing fit, which makes perfect sense to YOU, but to an outsider it looks as someone has hit a self-destruct button.

Red-faced and in remarkable pain, you have to acknowledge the many concerned, mostly backing-away-slowly-with-widened-eyes people who are around you, announce that you “choked”, and move on with your life.

This is a remarkably difficult reaction to master if you consider that your wonderfully advanced body almost accidentally killed itself performing the most basic bodily function there is.

More proof comes when you have to walk to the bathroom at night. Apparently during the night, either everyone walks with their feet taking a wild-swooping motion or everyone’s feet simply grow a bit. Because for some reason, a hasty walk to relieve oneself at night will often lead to you deciding that a good plan of action is to kick the hardest, sharpest surface that is available in the room, even one that was supposedly tucked into the corner out of harm’s way. Not a full blown kick, mind you, just a glancing blow. So your dainty, sensitive little toe takes the full force.

My little toe is permanently deformed thanks to many incidences like this, although my body is even more self-destructive in that I have the uncanny ability to do it in broad daylight, in no hurry at all.

Don’t even get me started on neck-cricking. The simple act of having your mouth open and turning your neck to look at something (not an unlikely occurence by any means) should not have the potential result of almost total paralysation! People walk away from airshows with their heads in all sorts of peculiar positions thanks to this little defect.

Why would your body feel it necessary to try and choke you to death at complete random, and then if that fails, try to break your body from the ground up?

Why? Because evolution doesn’t want us to get too cocky. It wants us to realise that yes, we are superior, but that is so easily taken away.

The last time I choked on my saliva was in the presence of a cat. The look of absolute derision I received from said cat would have been enough to make the volcanic ash cloud beat a hasty retreat back to Iceland. The look simply said “choking on one’s saliva? how preposterous; almost as silly as one choking on one’s own hai…..oh shit”.

Dear The News: Can We Have The News Back?

Unless you’ve been living the life of prehistoric amoeba, glugging about in your primordial ooze and blissfully unaware of anything beyond your own nucleus, you will have realised that someone in the royal family is getting married.

I say “realised”. What I mean is you’ll have had it rammed into every orifice you have (including two that were previously unknown to you) by anything that barely resembles a media source.

The day of the big announcement in question was particularly galling.

I was taking a lunch break at the time, which tends to coincide with the 1 o’clock news on the BBC. The news presenter was beaming at the camera, and this instantly sent alarm bells ringing. The stories they start the news off with are never beam-inducing. I slowly realised, however, that the happiness of the newsreader was more to do with the fact that he knew his shift for the next 30 minutes was going to be an absolute doddle.

So it came about that Kate Middleton and Prince William have announced their engagement. This simple message, which is really all that had actually happened, seemed to generate enough material for the news to spend 27 minutes covering it. The other three minutes was given to some completely unimportant story, like a prisoner being released after spending 7 years in custody and then having the charges against him simply dropped. Y’know, boring stuff.

These 27 minutes were split up into segments. They’d sent news reporters out on location to a number of equally cold and grey looking places that all bore some kind of significance to the to-be-weds, from outside Kate’s parents’ home to in front of some puddle that Prince William had apparently stepped in the other day.

They had “LIVE REACTIONS!” from random people who, surprisingly, were only known by and relevant to the couple, and even people who weren’t. They had some kind of analyst, emphasis on the first four letters, saying how tough it is for Kate, because she is an “outsider” to the family, apparently. Newsflash for the analyst, most people generally marry people who are outside of their family. It’s not exactly a new thing, to be honest. If Prince William had announced his engagement to Princess Anne, following a breakdown during a live interview where he admits to a long-lasting sordid affair, then yes, I might have been able to see how 27 minutes of news broadcasting could be taken up by that.

All of the news reporters who had happily dashed all over the country to stand in obsolete places so they can be the “REACTION FROM SCOTLAND” and “REACTION FROM WALES” and “REACTION FROM BIRKHAMPTON-ON-THE-TWEE” reported, without the remotest trace of irony, that privacy was the important issue that should be considered at all times. “We musn’t be too invasive as we’ve learnt about what happens from past experiences,” approximately stated a news reporter standing outside Kate’s parents’ home, on a grassy verge right in front of a main road that had a frequent flow of cars thundering past, making her have to raise her voice and touch her earlobe with not a little futility.

They even had the nerve, at 1.15, to recap what the headlines were. That’s 15 minutes of pure “OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG THEY’RE ENGAGED OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG” followed quickly by “By the way, THEY’RE ENGAGED”.

There was a hastily edited together biography of Kate Middleton, which did it’s absolute best to highlight how, apart from obviously having a more wealthier upbringing, is more or less a relatively unremarkable person. In fact, their relationship was also unremarkable, briefly spiced up by a shortish break halfway through when they fell out.

Essentially, the underlying tone amongst virtually all of my colleagues was, who cares?

The coverage was closed by ending on a financial note, as ever in these times, where  news people reported that the couple had stressed they would take the economic state of the country into consideration when planning their wedding, as of course it’ll be funded by the tax payer. “Bollocks” was my unelaborate and unsophisticated response to that.

The only way they can actually live up to that is by getting the Queen and the Prince of Wales in tracksuits (Prince Harry is able to think of inappropriate clothing quite adequately on his own) and shuffling everyone, corgies, the lot, into a registration office in Catford or Tower Hamlet, for a proper shoestring wedding. None of this “unicorns dancing on beds of unobtanium as gold-laced fireworks spell out the chemical equation for the meaning of life over Dolphins dancing synchronistically in a champagne-filled River Thames” lark that I can see, perhaps stereotypically, coming from Kate’s imagination.

That wasn’t exactly what the analyst said, strangely enough.

Ultimately, the news needs to get over it, and realise that people tune in for news. Not gossip.

Sort your shit out.